… You’ll have to squint to see it. Kuechly has worn the thin band that circles around the back of his neck, with two open ends that press slightly against either side of his jugular vein, throughout the preseason to little notice.
It’s only slightly visible in the small gap between his shoulder pads and the bottom of his helmet.
Kuechly, the first NFL player to wear this device, said repeatedly he can’t discuss it other than to confirm he has been wearing the experimental collar and will continue to do so. In fact, he hides it in his helmet when coming off the field to speak with media.
He’s the kind of player of whom security guards ask to see ID at the entrance of away stadiums. His listed weight is 40 pounds lighter (155 pounds) than the average U.S. adult man’s (195 pounds), and that mass is spread thin over his six-foot frame. When searching for a scout’s ideal right-handed pitcher body type — a matter that Baseball America explored in 2015 — you will not find any Davies comps.
Yet, here he is, helping the Brewers remain competitive in the NL Central race into mid-September.
Runner's World, Sweat Science blog, Alex Hutchinson from
… Is your ability to estimate how long it takes, say, five seconds to pass distorted?
That’s the question a new study in Physiology & Behavior, from researchers at the University of St. Mark and St. John in Plymouth, UK (an institution also known, with quintessentially British inscrutability, as Plymouth Marjon University), tackles.
The ability to read a chaotic situation on the run and react with relative grace is what sets Zoe Maxwell apart from her peers.
Off the pitch, too.
Maxwell had to make a difficult decision in a hurry over the weekend after learning her wish to play one last season at Irvington High School clashed with her desire to play a more competitive brand of soccer on a U.S. Soccer Development Academy team
… Bauer and Straily have both worked with Kyle Boddy at Driveline Baseball’s training center here, where Bauer expanded on the lessons he learned from Wolforth at the Texas Baseball Ranch in Montgomery, Tex. Neither Boddy nor Wolforth pitched professionally, but they have built thriving businesses by teaching each pupil to maximize — safely, they insist — his body’s capacity for throwing hard.
They symbolize, and have helped fuel, the speed game baseball has gradually become. According to FanGraphs, the average fastball in 2002 was 89 m.p.h. It has crept higher in each of the last seven seasons, to 92.8 m.p.h. Rising velocity is changing the sport, and all but shutting out pitchers who can’t keep up.
The New York Islanders got off to a slow start last season and, despite a strong second half that followed a midyear coaching change, finished a point out of a playoff spot.
Now, Doug Weight has promised a hard camp as he heads into his first full season at the helm, hoping that will help the team get off to a better start.
“We know camp is going to be tough,” forward Casey Cizikas said. “Dougie’s been telling us that from the get go. … We gave away a lot of games last year where we could have got points and that’s what kind of impaired us at the end.”
Startups hoping to sell health tracking devices and software to corporate customers are worried European regulators will torpedo their business model.
Employers should be banned from issuing workers with wearable fitness monitors, such as Fitbit, or other health tracking devices, even with the employees’ permission, a European Union advisory panel said in June. Employers should also be barred from accessing data from their devices their employees wear, even if it is only aggregate data for the entire workforce or anonymous data, the EU body said.
The first study to look at motivators for consistent or increased activity engagement among fitness tracker wearable users was published in the NEJM Catalyst (New England Journal of Medicine Group) from research conducted by the University of Southern California (USC) Center for Body Computing (CBC) and VSP Global’s innovation lab, The Shop. The innovative study, using a prototype of VSP’s unique Level™ smart glasses, found interaction with social networks and use of digital coaches via a smartphone app connected to a biometric sensor embedded in eyeglasses provided incentive for users to increase activity, including an average 20-25 percent spike in daily steps when prompted by a digital coach.
Medicine has throughout history been a artisanal vocation — that is, it has focused on the skill and experience of the individual doctor, rather than looking to build a standardized process for diagnosing and treating patients. In recent years this has started to change, as initiatives like Evidence Based Medicine and Precision Medicine have tried to inject additional rigor and data-driven practices into the field. However, the vast majority of medical care is provided through the traditional Hippocratic philosophy.
This needs to change. The largest population centers on the planet have less than 1/10th of the doctors they need, and it will take hundreds of years to fill the gap. Misdiagnoses, late diagnoses, and over-diagnoses kill millions and cost tens of billions. The technology is now being developed to fix this problem — to give medical workers and patients a clear summary of the exact information they need, when they need it. Such technology can give a remote area community health worker access to a distillation of the world’s medical knowledge. It can make doctors in the developed world dramatically more productive and accurate , while giving patients and families more control over and insight into their medical care.
How do you get a growing Cubs or White Sox player to eat his vegetables — or anything else that’s healthy?
Cubs team nutrition consultant Dawn Jackson Blatner remembers a few spring trainings ago when she was trying to get players to drink “shots” of matcha green tea and not having much luck.
Irakli Loladze is a mathematician by training, but he was in a biology lab when he encountered the puzzle that would change his life. It was in 1998, and Loladze was studying for his Ph.D. at Arizona State University. Against a backdrop of glass containers glowing with bright green algae, a biologist told Loladze and a half-dozen other graduate students that scientists had discovered something mysterious about zooplankton.
Zooplankton are microscopic animals that float in the world’s oceans and lakes, and for food they rely on algae, which are essentially tiny plants. Scientists found that they could make algae grow faster by shining more light onto them—increasing the food supply for the zooplankton, which should have flourished. But it didn’t work out that way. When the researchers shined more light on the algae, the algae grew faster, and the tiny animals had lots and lots to eat—but at a certain point they started struggling to survive. This was a paradox. More food should lead to more growth. How could more algae be a problem?
Loladze was technically in the math department, but he loved biology and couldn’t stop thinking about this. The biologists had an idea of what was going on: The increased light was making the algae grow faster, but they ended up containing fewer of the nutrients the zooplankton needed to thrive. By speeding up their growth, the researchers had essentially turned the algae into junk food. The zooplankton had plenty to eat, but their food was less nutritious, and so they were starving.
When it comes time for the University of Wisconsin’s Tony Granato to lead the 2018 U.S. Olympic Men’s Ice Hockey Team in PyeongChang, 20 years will have passed since he last wore red, white and blue as a player at the Olympic Winter Games Nagano 1998. Granato was recently named head coach of the Olympic team and is tasked with leading a group of young hockey players into the most competitive international hockey competition in the world.
“There is no greater thrill in the game of hockey than to be able to cheer for, represent and wear the sweater,” Granato said at his introductory press conference in Plymouth, Michigan, earlier this month. The head coach will be joined by an all-star lineup of assistant coaches: Keith Allain, Chris Chelios, Ron Rolston and Scott Young.
Each member of the coaching staff kick-started their career playing college hockey, providing the staff with a unique perspective.
… Controversies over national eligibility are not uncommon in sport. Football allows national qualification through the birthplace of any parent or grandparent. But there are no universal rules across all sports, and most do not even force athletes to commit until they have competed at senior international level. This has enabled a series of athletes and players to represent one nation at junior level and then another at senior level.
To tighten eligibility rules, and mute the effect of the economic pull of England on the UK population, the British football associations have agreed to not use FIFA rules that allow national qualification through two years of residency. This prevents the many overseas players in the Premier League qualifying for England but it also means that the British national teams do not reflect the cosmpolitan nature of a UK with 8.6m residents born elsewhere.
Some top coaches and administrators in college hockey held a summit in Chicago recently to discuss possible rules changes in response to a trend of schools recruiting players in their early teens, or younger.
Gophers coach Don Lucia represented Big Ten coaches on the new recruiting advisory committee, which consists of one coach, one administrator and the commissioner from all six hockey conferences.
In a bit of irony, Lucia received verbal commitments from a 13-year-old and 14-year-old last week.